Explore "The Missioner" by E. Phillips Oppenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Hortense smiled softly to herself as she laid down the ivory-backed brushes. What did it mean, she wondered, when her mistress went out with tired eyes and pallid cheeks, and came home with the colour of a rose and eyes like stars, humming an old French love-song, and her feet moving all the time to some unheard music? It was years since she had seen her like this! Hortense knew the signs and was well pleased. At last, then, the household was to be properly established. A woman as beautiful as her mistress without a lover was to Hortense an incomprehensible thing.
"You can go now, Hortense," her mistress ordered. "I will have my coffee half an hour earlier to-morrow morning."